This has been a challenge in a region where – notwithstanding the large footprint created by the exploding international art market – poetry remains the dominant form of high cultural production.
The process of cultivating the language of independent cinema among aspiring filmmakers is a long-term one, festooned with distractions.
On one hand a surfeit of wealth can ease access to filmmaking apparatus – production and post-production equipment and the technicians to operate them – long before youngsters have developed the basic skills filmmakers need to make interesting work, relatively cheaply.
Then there is the flash and bling of rival audio-visual forms – the soap operatic tales and broad comedies of television, say, or hip, but equally jejune, web series – that offer the instant gratification of speaking readily to unschooled popular audiences.
That said, there are glimmerings.
One of these is the 21-minute short “Cholo,” a quietly ambitious little work by 26-year-old Muzna Almusafer that won the best screenplay prize in in ADFF’s Emirates Film Competition Thursday evening.
The film tells the simple story of an encounter between Cholo, an 11-year-old Zanzibari boy, and his half brother Abdullah, who visits the island from Muscat with the boys’ father Said.
There are unspoken tensions between the two boys, apparently connected with relative privilege and access to their father, whose absence from Zanzibar has made the neglected Cholo a child of the street.
The boys’ differences are underlined by their distinct racial and cultural character – Cholo being a Swahili-speaker and much darker than the fair-skinned, Arabic-educated Abdullah.
The two boys shrug off these differences, seemingly because their encounter is staged on the streets of Zanzibar, the elder Cholo’s home turf. The pair hang out, share some low-key adventures and exchange mementos. Then Abdullah and Said return to Muscat, leaving Cholo alone again.
Compared to the other shorts projected in this section of the EFC – one of which features Hollywood actor Johnny Knoxville and Vogue-quality lensing, vintage automobiles and Vivienne Westwood costuming – “Cholo” is as refreshingly understated as it is solid.
The relaxed pacing and unaffected performances of her nonprofessional cast betray the art house language that the Omani filmmaker is emulating. There are a few kinks in the writing – mostly connected with the handling of the low-intensity conflicts that simmer beneath the surface of the action – but Almusafer consistently steers clear of melodrama and serves her narrative far better as a result.
The Muscat-born writer-director says she was raised in an artistic environment – her father Moosa being a recognized local artist, a painter, while her Bahrain-born mother was a great lover of poetry.
Almusafer has studied mass communication in Kuwait City and film criticism in Stockholm. Her first short, “Niqab,” screened in the student film competition of Dubai’s Gulf Film Festival in 2010, where it took the top prize.
She chose to set her short in Zanzibar, she says, out of fascination with the historic cultural, economic and political relationship between Oman and the East African coast, which to her knowledge has never been explored in fiction film.
“Cholo” is a microbudget work. To cast her four characters, she spent 20 days in Zanzibar schools and on the street, then shot the film in six days. Almusafer’s producer-cinematographer Giacomo Abbruzzese shot the short on an iPhone 5, pimped out with a wide-angle lens, and edited using a MacBook Pro.
The quality of the image is not that of film (remember film?) but it does come close to replicating some of the intimacy of the small-formats of yesteryear.
There are glimmerings.